Human Flow
Ai Weiwei
****
Human Flow comes from the mind of world renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei, and stands as testament to his characteristic blend of provocation, compassion and visual allure.
The film gives poetic expression to the global refugee crisis, tracing the pathway of displaced peoples along both horizontal and vertical lines; as drone footage sweeps across the continents, we grasp the overwhelming scope of human movement across land and sea, whilst camera and handheld footage from the beaches, the camps and the closed border gates punctuates the depth of trauma for each and every individual, forced to abandon the place they call home.
Running time: 140 MIN.
THE AESTHETIC OF DEATH
Theodor Adorno famously declared in the wake of the Holocaust that certain, horrific events exceed the capabilities of art. By implication, he continues, any attempt to recreate such an event – whether it be in poem, song, picture or film – will necessarily cast itself to the realm of the absurd. Weiwei’s documentary no doubt raises a significant challenge to Adorno’s theory, pointing the lens directly at mankind in the midst of utter catastrophe. We watch as a Syrian asylum seeker vomits during her interview with Weiwei, physically overcome with anguish; we see bodies mangled and abandoned in a raging Kenyan dust storm, Mosul oil fields burning behind plumes of black smoke; we gaze on as a group of male refugees in Turkey are crying behind a protest sign reading “Respect”, and as children wallow in rubbish and feces as it flows through Kutupalong migrant Camp.
Indeed, watching Human Flow is nothing short of unbearable – full of raw, unmediated horror. Yet, crucially, the sensation to look away in shame or disgust is held in tension with a mesmerising optical allure. Many of the film’s most memorable frames are taken from sweeping drone footage, turning human bodies into ants who scurry from border to border, or into specs of fluorescent orange drifting endlessly across the vast blue of the Mediterranean. The effect is breathtaking, shocking and dehumanising all at once. The eye of the viewer is gifted a kind of illusory divinity in these moments – omniscient, distant, and somehow above.
The illusion, of course, is dangerous, and the beauty misleading, gifting the flow of human bodies a kind of organic semblance when, in reality, each one of those specs is a human being, terrified, vulnerable, and in need of sanctuary. Far from indulge in the illusion, however, Weiwei counters this sweeping, horizontal vantage point with a sharp, vertical descent to the ground. Shaky phone camera footage replaces that of the drone, recording the terror of men and women, screaming and choking as smoke missiles explode between the tents of their camp in Northern Greece in an attempt to drive them away from the border.
Human Flow is, above all else, a necessary resistance to our developing global immunity towards the plight of refugees. “It is the most pervasive kind of cruelty that can be exercised toward a human being” we are told, and no where is this more evident than in Weiwei’s staggering epic.
CINEMATIC POETRY
Herein lies the mastery of Weiwei’s project: antithesis. Human Flow intertwines beauty with chaos; it is simultaneously compelling and alienating. We watch with relative ease the birds eye footage of tiny black human dots flowing from left to right across our screen, struck by the beauty of the image, yet we can hardly bear to look at the exhausted face of a mother who has been carrying her child for 60 days along a path to nowhere. This is not to say that Human Flow indicts its viewers; rather, it demands from us a more holistic awareness – a consideration of both the scale and depth of a crisis we can only comfortably digest from afar, in pictures and statistics.
Nizip Camp, Gaziantep, Turkey. 2016/03027. A still from Human Flow by Ai Weiwei. Image courtesy of https://www.humanflow.com/gallery/
One particularly touching scene sees Weiwei himself, an unassuming observer for much of the film, joke with a Syrian asylum seeker about swapping passports and, by implication, mobility. Once a displaced child himself, exiled to a labour camp in the Gobi Desert, Weiwei has devoted his most recent work to those for whom nowhere is home, and he is today one of the most prominent humanitarian activists defending the rights of the worlds 65million displaced peoples. These brief moments of gentle empathy are in many ways the thread that pulls the overwhelming volume of footage in Human Flow together.”I respect you” he declares sincerely at the close of the exchange, “I respect you, and I respect your passport”.
Like so much of his work, then, Weiwei builds this film around a central contrast; both the “staggering scale of the refugee crisis” and its “profoundly personal human impact” (https://www.humanflow.com/synopsis/) are gifted equal weight, as are the aesthetics paired to match. A number of critics have been quick to dismiss the film on this count, suggesting that Weiwei makes little effort to distinguish between the unique groups of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in 23 different countries, nor the complex crises from which they are fleeing. Yet, for me at least, the force of Human Flow lies not in any single story line, but in the weight and depth of its blow; an epic, more akin to a deeply evocative poem than a richly detailed novel. Images from Gaza, Mexico and Iraq blend together amidst passages from religious scripture and narration from international civil rights activists, all of which works towards a tone that is ultimately more philosophical than it is polemical.
There are no easy answers, no obvious solutions, nor any clear instructions; Wewei frustrates any desire to simply dig into our pockets and put our conscience at ease. Instead, the weight of this film is one we cannot easily shift, and so we ourselves come to experience a kind of helplessness. According to Weiwei, here is where compassion begins, and will be so crucial to the future of displaced peoples. 140 minutes of cinema, compiled in fragments from over 900 hours of footage, and from all over the world, work in Human Flow towards one simple end: to remind our global community of the rights – to freedom, to respect and to sanctuary - every human life deserves.